Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

48 hour interview: Antanas Sileika and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer

Open Book Toronto has this wonderful initiative in which they put a couple of writers/publishers/editors/book designer in the same cyber-room for a fixed period of time and let them have at it. Although Antanas and I both teach, we decided not to talk about that and so we talked about writing and risk, writing and history, writing and publishing. Here is a snippet:

“There was an article by Ian Brown in the Globe this weekend about the Olympics in which a quip from Bruce Kidd, the dean of the faculty of education and health at The University of Toronto stood out for me: “High Performance sport has become so podium focused that it has become impermeable to the curriculum of Olympism.”

Just change “sport” for “fiction writing” and “Olympism” to “Literature.” I do not know exactly what the curriculum of fiction might be in Canada, but I feel that perhaps the focus should shift back in that direction, whatever it may be. Fiction should be manifesting from rocks we writers dare turn over, from what ugliness we can shine light on and therefore, by the recreation, make something meaningful.

Of course as many risks as we may want to take as writers, we have to consider the gate-keepers in all this, we have to ask ourselves what will be publishable in our country.”

Here is the full article.